It’s really becoming a tired song and dance on two fronts. Any time schools, parents and students mount a protest to the Common Core standards and testing in New York state, two things happen. Supporters threaten them with funding sanctions, and they redouble efforts to explain why Common Core is such a good thing for kids. Because you know, parents are just too stupid to know what’s right for their kids.

Now that new state education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, has stepped in, it’s ‘next verse, same as the first’ time in New York. She recently responded to the news that 20% of student in New York did not take the Common Core tests.

In the conference call with reporters, Elia said the sanctions weren’t clearly defined and could simply consist of a phone call to superintendents asking what happened and what they plan to do differently next year. But it’s also possible that federal Title I funds will be withheld, she said.

As Fred LeBrun wrote, King spent much of his tenure ‘pretending to listen, but he kept at it.’

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did the same, threatening schools time and again should the students rebel and opt out of the testing. He told parents that the feds would “have an obligation to step in,” even implying that they were racist for even thinking about opting out.

It looks like more of the same with Elia. And here is her tired response in having to re-educate the parents on the Common Core standards.

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.